A black hospital orderly has been charged with strangulation for choking a 6-year-old patient so hard that he left bruises on the boy’s neck, officials said

Nassau University Medical Center employee Azoumana Ouattara, 45, has been arraigned and bail was set at $10,000 bond. The victim’s mother, Angela Iovino, said that she is still furious over the assault, which happened October 28, 2011 on the hospital’s pediatric psychiatric ward. “He came out with more damage than he went in with,” she said of her son, Nicholas, who is hyperactive and has a mood disorder. “He should pick on someone his own size,” she said of the portly hospital worker. Iovino, 37, said that she admitted her son to the hospital in late October 2011 so he could have his medication adjusted, and got a call a few days later from a hospital worker who said that her son had been choked the night before. She assumed that another child had done it and was shocked to find out when she arrived at the hospital that an employee was suspected. “When I saw his neck, I called the cops within minutes,” she said. “He had sick purple marks down his neck. I asked him what happened. He said he was giving the guy a problem going to bed, he kept getting out of bed. Then he cursed at the guy.” She said Nicholas told her: “I said a bad word to him. Then he said it back to me and held me down by my throat in the bed.” Iovino, who lives in Bellmore, plans to sue the hospital. She said that staffers tried to stop her from taking her son out of the hospital and stonewalled cops about the culprit’s identity. Cops told her that when Ouatarra was first questioned, he claimed he had no choice but to restrain Nicholas, the mom said, scoffing at that notion. “He had to restrain him by his neck?” she said. “He broke capillaries in his left eye!” She said that her son doesn’t like to talk about the incident and refers to the medical center as “the hospital where that guy choked me.”